A lot of how we, as human beings, perceive the world around us has a lot to do with the tone and mood with which information is communicated to us. Mr. Scott of Hughes Academy in Charleston, South Carolina explains:
Tone and mood both deal with the emotions centered around a piece of writing. Though they seem similar and can in fact be related causally, they are in fact quite different.
Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject. While journalistic writing theoretically has a tone of distance and objectivity, all other writing can have various tones.
If we were to read a description of a first date that included words and phrases like “dreaded” and “my buddies forced me to go on the date”, we could assume that the individual didn’t really enjoy the date....
Mood is the atmosphere of a piece of writing; it’s the emotions a selection arouses in a reader.
Of course, the application of mood and tone extends far beyond the written word - we see it in all forms of communication. As a basic example, consider the tone and mood established in the trailer for the movie Gravity:
Now consider how differently the audience would perceive the movie if the following alternate scenes, lasting a total of one minute and twelve seconds, had not been cut from the film because of the differences they present in the mood and tone for the story the film's director wanted to tell:
And that's one reason why so many people rightfully believe that literary authors and film directors are total jerks.